Friend of My Youth

lesbian, and Bugs was not her mother but her rich and jealous lover.
    “Is there a woman or a hunk of concrete?” he said, molding the silk to her hip.
    Averill didn’t care. This was the last night that she would have to see him. And she was drinking. She liked to drink. She liked especially to drink champagne. It made her feel not excited but blurry and forgiving.
    She talked to the first mate, who was engaged to a girl from the mountains and showed an agreeable lack of love interest in herself.
    She talked to the cook, a handsome woman who had formerly taught English in Norwegian high schools and was now intent on a more adventurous life. Jeanine had told Averill that the cook and the artist were believed to be sleeping together, and a certain challenging, ironic edge to the cook’s friendliness made Averill think that this might be true.
    She talked to Leslie, who said that she had once been a harpist. She had been a young harpist playing dinner music in a hotel, and the professor had spotted her behind the ferns. She had not been a student, as people thought. It was after they became involved that the professor had her enroll in some courses, to develop her mind. She giggled over her champagne and said that it had not worked. She had resisted mind development but had given up the harp.
    Jeanine spoke to Averill in a voice as low and confidential as she could make it. “How will you manage with her?” she said. “What will you do in England? How can you take her on a train? This is serious.”
    “Don’t worry,” Averill said.
    “I have not been open with you,” said Jeanine. “I have to go to the bathroom, but I want to tell you something when I come out.”
    Averill hoped that Jeanine did not intend to make more disclosures about the artist or give more advice about Bugs. She didn’t. When she came out of the bathroom, she began to talk about herself. She said that she was not on a little vacation, as she had claimed. She had been turfed out. By her husband, who had left her for a sexpot moron who worked as a receptionist at the station. Being a receptionist involved doing her nails and occasionally answering the telephone. The husband considered that he and Jeanine should still be friends, and he would come to visit, helping himself to the wine and describing the pretty ways of his paramour. How she sat up in bed, naked, doing—what else?—her fingernails. He wanted Jeanine to laugh with him and commiserate with him over his ill-judged and besotted love. And she did—Jeanine did. Time andagain she fell in with what he wanted and listened to his tales and watched her wine disappear. He said he loved her—Jeanine—as if she were the sister he’d never had. But now Jeanine meant to pull him out of her life by the roots. She was up and away. She meant to live.
    She still had her eye on the captain, though it was the eleventh hour. He had turned down champagne and was drinking whiskey.
    The cook had brought up a coffee tray for those who did not drink or who wished to sober up early. When somebody finally tried a cup, the cream proved to be on the turn—probably from sitting for a while in the warm room. Unflustered, the cook took it away, promising to bring back fresh. “It will be good on the pancakes in the morning,” she said. “With brown sugar, on the pancakes.”
    Jeanine said that somebody had told her once that when the milk was sour you could suspect that there was a dead body on the ship.
    “I thought it was a kind of superstition,” Jeanine said. “But he said no, there’s a reason. The ice. They have used all the ice to keep the body, so the milk goes sour. He said he had known it to happen, on a ship in the tropics.”
    The captain was asked, laughingly, if there was any such problem on board this ship.
    He said not that he knew of, no. “And we have plenty of refrigerator space,” he said.
    “Anyway, you bury them at sea, don’t you?” said Jeanine. “You can marry or bury at sea, can’t you? Or do you really refrigerate them and send them home?”
    “We do as the case dictates,” said the captain.
    But had it happened with him, he was asked—were there bodies kept, had there been burials at sea?
    “A young chap once, one of the crew, died of appendicitis. He hadn’t any family we knew of; we buried him at sea.”
    “That’s a funny expression, when you think of it,” said Leslie, who was giggling at everything. “Buried at sea.”
    “Another time—”